Thursday, 10 November 2016

My First International FOSS Event: FUDCon Phnom Penh

It was a privilege to be a speaker at FUDCon, Cambodia 2016. This being my first international FOSS event was ever more exciting. Right from the day I received the invitation from Sirko, I felt extremely privileged. On reaching the place I found that the event was much bigger than what I had expected it to be. There was a bar camp being organised by the university with over 5000 participants. Simply speaking it was a grand and huge occasion.

My talk started just after the opening keynote and it was on 'Android Development on Fedora'. Android being a popular name and Fedora being a increasingly popular Linux distribution attracted lots of enthusiastic listeners to my talk. The discussion focused mainly on configuring Fedora for Android Development. It covered many programming languages like native code, python, html, java, etc. I also spoke in details about the command line tools and also the IDEs available for this purpose.

The discussion covered detailed aspects like setting environment variables, setting path for JDK, SDK and other things. There was discussion about build tools like ant and maven, about emulators and smart phone devices and about wrappers like phonegap. I showed the audience that everything works seamlessly on Fedora. I would always stress upon the fact that Android development in any form can be done well on Fedora as a Fedora machine can be configured perfectly to achieve these targets.

Among the IDEs I spoke about Android Studio. Android studio has the gradle building tool.There is intelligent code completion and superb support for installing emulators. Besides one can go for cloud integration with the help of Android Studio. The discussion covered the installation of different tools related to android development such as the SDK and NDK. A discussion about how graphic designs can be shown using native code and NDK caught the attention of everyone.

Besides this there were many other talks by people from the Fedora community and other participants of the bar camp that were excellent in content and nature. I shall discuss about those talks and workshops in a subsequent blog post and there may also be a blog post talking about my experience and what I learnt from this FUDCon at Cambodia.